Henri Le Châtelier (1850-1936): ou la science appliquée à l'industrie (review)

This biography of Henri Le Châtelier is based on Michel Letté's Ph.D. dissertation, defended in 1998 in Paris at the EHESS. Probably with a wider readership in mind, the published version is much shorter and a sort of hybrid. The book is "lighter" than the dissertation with fewer footnotes and a shorter bibliography, but it is neither an intimate biography that nonaca-demics would like to read nor a heroic tale. Academics interested in Le Châtelier should read the dissertation in all its detail and in the full breadth of its argumentation and documentation based on family archives as well as the archives of the French Academy of Science, the E´cole polytechnique, and the E´cole nationale supérieure des mines in Paris, among others.

To understand the author's point of view, the reader must remember that, generally speaking, French culture is dualistic and even contradictory. On the one hand, there is the noble and pure activity that is science; on the other, there are technology and industry, which are often considered to be impure, the province of money-makers and businessmen. Le Châtelier is definitely not as famous as Louis Pasteur nor a scientist ensconced within the French scientific pantheon, even though he did important work in thermodynamic chemistry and metallurgy. His work was too scattered, his accomplishments being mainly as the preeminent champion of cooperation between scientists and industrialists.

The book opens in the 1850s with a chronicle of the Le Châtelier family, a precise description of the young Henri's training and the family's network before Henri first became a civil servant. More interesting is the remainder of the book, which is divided into six parts that analyze the emergence of what Le Châtelier himself called "industrial science" and its development in La Revue de métallurgie to the creation of the chair of industrial chemistry at the École nationale supérieure des mines in Paris. As the founder of a new discipline, Le Châtelier used all ways and means to promote it. During France's second industrialization, especially after World War I, he ran up against the French state, which was seeking to establish a national policy of research at the same time—an aim that resulted in the founding of the National Center for Scientific Research in 1939.

"Industrial science" was more than a way to facilitate the development of a strong national industry by means of cooperation with the scientific establishment. Le Châtelier's work was certainly the first step in the direction of conceptualizing the engineering sciences. In France, he was prob-ably the first to promote the concept of "training by research," and he played an important role in disseminating Frederick Winslow Taylor's theories and methods. Le Châtelier believed that he was establishing laws of procedure that the industrial world needed, laws that entailed drawing on the authority bestowed by science. He also sought to terminate the continuous fighting between capital and labor. For Le Châtelier, the big question was how to mobilize rational industrial science in the service of social development and the progress of humankind. It was organization—social, industrial, and scientific—that was his primary focus, a technocratic model of the relationships between science and production, science and organization, and science and politics, all with the engineer as a central character. It was because of this focus that Le Châtelier is forgotten today.

Not only does this book shed light on the linking of science and industry during the twentieth century, it confirms that historians studying this link in France need to more carefully develop their analyses of the French innovative process.